The under-rated Tsunehiko Watase, one of Toei's most reliable supporting (and occasional lead) actors in various gangster films, died this week at the age of 72. Watase was also the younger brother of Nikkatsu star Tetsuya Watari. Rest in peace.

Yakuza Masterpiece (やくざ絶唱) (1970)
Shintaro Katsu gives the performance of a lifetime in this absolutely mind blowing yakuza film by Yasuzo Masumura. Katsu is a hot headed gangster who treats women like trash, except for his little sister (Naoko Otani), whose innocence is his only pride. He guards her night and day and beats all the boyfriend candidates to hospital, desperately trying to make sure she won't become what he is. But after he lands in jail (for not only beating the shit out of four men, but also the policemen who came to arrest him) she's left alone. Ironically, she chooses to follow her brother's path. A thoroughly gripping film with amazing performances by Katsu and little sister Otani, who can more than stand up against Katsu. This film serves as a good reminder that modern Japanese gangster films are nothing but a lame joke compared to movies like this; and Otani has more balls than the entire male cast of Gonin Saga (2015).

I've seen Aesthetics of a Bullet and Killer's Black List (both in 35mm). The latter is not that great. It's one of those modern day crime films that are neither ninkyo nor jitsuroku. Bloody, but not especially exciting. Kanjuro Arashi has a knife fight, and frankly he looked way too old to handle that. To be honest, I don't really remember that much about the film.

Aesthetics of a Bullet is pretty cool. Here's my old mini review:

Aesthetics of a Bullet (Japan, 1973) [35mm] - 3.5/5
Workman director Sadao Nakajima took a small break from Toei's genre pictures to helm this Art Theater Guild production. It is, in fact, not that different from his Toei films, although it has a certain independent film aura with extra attention to realism and detail. The film portrays gangsters as incompetent losers who cannot even start epic trouble. The protagonist is a street thug who makes his living selling rabbits and living off his girlfriend's money. He finally gets a chance to rise through the ranks when he's sent to Kyushu to kill a man. Star Tsunehiko Watase is clearly enjoying playing a bigger loser than usual, although he hadn’t reaches his peak as an actor yet. Pinky Violence starlet Miki Sugimoto is an interesting piece of casting; she'd make a bigger impression a few years later in ATG's Preparation for the Festival, though. Rock band Zuno Keisatsu provides the electrifying soundtrack.

I guess I should mention Arrow is releasing New Battle Without Honor and Humanity on 17th July 2017

NEW BATTLES WITHOUT HOUNOUR AND HUMANITY: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY
New Battles Without Honour and Humanity
New Battles Without Honour and Humanity: The Boss's Head
New Battles Without Honour and Humanity: Last Days of the Boss

In the early 1970s, Kinji Fukasaku's five-film Battles Without Honour and Humanity series was a massive hit in Japan, and kicked off a boom in realistic, modern yakuza films based on true stories. Although Fukasaku had intended to end the series, Toei Studio convinced him to return to the director's chair for this unconnected, follow-up trilogy of films, each starring Battles leading man Bunta Sugawara and telling separate, but fictional stories about the yakuza in different locations in Japan.

In the first film, Bunta Sugawara is Miyoshi, a low-level assassin of the Yamamori gang who is sent to jail after a bungled hit. While in stir, family member Aoki (Lone Wolf and Cub's Tomisaburo Wakayama) attempts to seize power from the boss, and Miyoshi finds himself stuck between the two factions with no honourable way out. In the second entry, The Boss's Head, Sugawara is Kuroda, an itinerant gambler who steps in when a hit by drug-addicted assassin Kusunoki (Tampopo's Tsutomu Yamazaki) goes wrong, and takes the fall on behalf of the Owada family, but when the gang fails to make good on financial promises to him, Kuroda targets the family bosses with a ruthless vengeance. And in Last Days of the Boss, Sugawara plays Nozaki, a labourer who swears allegiance to a sympathetic crime boss, only to find himself elected his successor after the boss is murdered. Restrained by a gang alliance that forbids retributions against high-level members, Nozaki forms a plot to exact revenge on his rivals, but a suspicious relationship with his own sister (Chieko Matsubara from Outlaw: Gangster VIP) taints his relationship with his fellow gang members.

Making their English-language home video debut in this limited edition set, the New Battles Without Honour and Humanity films are important links between the first half of Fukasaku's career and his later exploration of other genres. Each one is also a top-notch crime action thriller: hard-boiled, entertaining, and distinguished by Fukasaku's directorial genius, funky musical scores by composer Toshiaki Tsushima, and the onscreen power of Toei's greatest yakuza movie stars.

LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS:
• High Definition digital transfers of all three films
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
• Original uncompressed mono audio
• New optional English subtitle translation for all three films
• Beyond the Films: New Battles Without Honour and Humanity, a new video appreciation by Fukasaku biographer Sadao Yamane
• New Stories, New Battles and Closing Stories, two new interviews with screenwriter Koji Takada, about his work on the second and third films in the trilogy • Original theatrical trailers for all three films
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Reinhard Kleist • Illustrated collector’s book featuring new writing on the films, the yakuza genre and Fukasaku's career, by Stephen Sarrazin, Tom Mes, Hayley Scanlon, Chris D. and Marc Walkow
- http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/shop/index. ... uct_id=959

Not an unexpected choice from Arrow. Like with COPS VS THUGS these films have also been out on BD in Japan for a while so it's slightly less exciting then them scoring a BD premiere like WOLF GUY or DOBERMAN COP.

On an unrelated note, two films directed by Atsushi Yamatoya just hit DVD in Japan. These include his directorial debut SEASON OF BETRAYAL 裏切りの季節(1966) and THE PISTOL THAT SPROUTED HAIR 毛の生えた拳銃 (1968).

Toei will give stand alone releases to all their Ken Takakura BD box set films in 2017/10/25. That means the Abashiri Prison films (10), the Brutal Tale of Chivalry films (8) and the ones from the Takakura set(Bullet Train, Railroad Man, The Firefly, Dôran, Winter's Flower).

Good news for people like me who couldn't afford the box sets but might want to pick up a few favourite films.

Great! It seems photobucket has updated their terms so that you can't post your images on websites anymore unless you pay $400 a year. That means a couple of thousand screencaps I've posted here are no longer visible (the last couple of years should be mostly ok as I was using my blog as a host). Sorry about that.

+ there's gonna be 12 new releases of Wakamatsu films that were already out on dvd. I don't know if the transfers will be new or not. The cool thing for those located in Japan is that they are finally made available for rental, too. The lack of rental versions is the reason why I haven't seen too many Wakamatsu films.
- http://natalie.mu/eiga/news/239280

Although these will be DVD releases, they will almost certainly utilize new HD masters (since Toei never released them on dvd before, it's unlikely they had SD masters available). Which means that if Arrow and others have any interest in these titles, now is your chance!

Btw, Toei also screened Love and Crime in HD on Toei Channel last month, even though it's a title they released on DVD more than a decade ago.

HungFist wrote:Oh and I can't believe they are finally putting Malformed Men out.

That is indeed surprising but I just can't see myself buying any of these again unless they hit BD. It's only a matter of time, surely.

As for Malformed Men there's no way Toei can top the excellent Synapse DVD.

Orgies of Edo and Yakuza's Law on the other hand... I have the HK Video DVDs and while they are ok, I never liked their transfers very much (they nearly always go for strange bluish skin tones for some reason). I'd expect the Toei DVDs to look more natural.

But you're right. It's the BD format that those films ought to hit. I'd like to support Toei, though, because if we do, maybe they'll be encouraged to put out some stuff.

+ there's gonna be 12 new releases of Wakamatsu films that were already out on dvd. I don't know if the transfers will be new or not. The cool thing for those located in Japan is that they are finally made available for rental, too. The lack of rental versions is the reason why I haven't seen too many Wakamatsu films.
- http://natalie.mu/eiga/news/239280

This is indeed a whole series consisting of five parts (by Wakamatsu. I don't know if other directors contributed to it)

Although these will be DVD releases, they will almost certainly utilize new HD masters (since Toei never released them on dvd before, it's unlikely they had SD masters available). Which means that if Arrow and others have any interest in these titles, now is your chance!

Btw, Toei also screened Love and Crime in HD on Toei Channel last month, even though it's a title they released on DVD more than a decade ago.

Oh and I can't believe they are finally putting Malformed Men out.

Here's the funny thing. Yakuza's Law and Orgies of Edo have been given R15 ratings and Malformed Men is PG-12! The text on Toei's site says that they were originally released as "adult films" (R18) but those designations are out of date, and the contents corresponds to R15 and PG-12 respectively by modern standards. They are uncut, it says.

This is a late work from Nakajima that I didn't have very high expectations for. And initially all my fears seemed justified because this film runs almost 2 hours and it's strictly a yakuza drama for the first half or so with no action anywhere in sight. The story concerns a large yakuza organisation struggling to find a successor for their recently deceased boss and at first the film concerns itself with all the various conflicting factions and the political scheming going on. Of course things don't work out, there's a split in the group and things eventually escalate to an all-out war. And this is where the film really comes alive in quite spectacular fashion. After a nasty torture scene involving a blowtorch and chainsaw we get a decent amount of amazingly bloody shoot-out scenes before things are finally resolved.

This was Nakajima's 4th films as a director, following the two Kunoichi movies and Hatamoto Yakuza, another period film that I don't think was ever released on home video. Yakuza Hooligans was shot in black and white and plays like a rather strange hybrid of the youth and yakuza film genres. The poster artwork makes it look like it'll be a wacky comedy but it actually goes to some pretty dark places in the course of its narrative. It's about a group of friends who are small-time criminals but don't feel up for becoming actual yakuza. Eventually they do become involved with real gangsters and decide to steal 10 million yen from them. Not a very smart decision, that. It bears repeating that this isn't a comedy. Don't expect a happy ending either. The part that surprised me the most was a scene where the group decide to rape a woman and one of them, who is of mixed Japanese and African American descent breaks down crying saying he can't do that because "that's how I was made".

This is one of those yakuza films that are pretty much all drama and no action. CONQUEST has an impressive cast with Toshiro Mifune, Bunta Sugawara, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Koji Tsuruta, Tetsuro Tanba, Akira Kobayashi... Hell, it'd be easier to list which Toei star wasn't in this film! A failed assassination attempt on Mifune's yakuza boss opens the film but from then on it's mostly a family drama with the problems of his children and wife getting more screentime than the typical squabbles over who will eventually succeed the boss. One of his sons is running a fashion business that gets raided for tax evasion because the cops want to bring down his father's group. His daughter (Kumiko Akiyoshi) is dating a reporter who is torn between his feeling for her and pressure from the newpaper to use her as an inside source for juicy stories. And so on. Tomisaburo Wakayama walks away with the entire film as a member of a different gang who had his life saved once by the oyabun and is now more loyal to him than practially anybody else.

Yasuharu Hasebe took a break from the Roman Porno series to do this biker youth / disco film for Toei Central. And what an opening it has! Hiroshi Tachi on a bike. Cut to a disco where he tames a Nikkatsu runaway girl gang (Yuri Yamashina with razor blades, Natsuko Yashiro). And then he goes all Travolta to "Funky Disco Princess" on the dance floor. Tachi was one of those rock stars turned actors who were better screen performers than you'd expect (Yuya Uchida, who also happens to be in the film, is another). His youthful looks combined with charisma a strangely suffering look on his face made him perfect for playing melancholic punks. This was his first starring role after a couple fine supporting turns (e.g. Classroom of Terror, 1976). The film is basically Rebel Without a Cause meets Saturday Night Fever done in the Japanese youth film genre, fun and colourful, but ultimately lacking in characterization, and perhaps also missing the final punch on the tech side. Aiko Morishita has a small supporting role with no bare skin on display.

Tachi!

Travolta time!

Yuya Uchida. He only appears very briefly in a couple of scenes

Yuri Yamashina in the middle (in blond wig). Natsuko Yashiro next to her in red & white

Aiko Morishita

Yoko Natsuki does a bit better here than in New Female Prisoner Scorpion: Special Cellblock X only because no charisma needed in this role